Standards are about trademark, not copyright [LWN.net]

Standards are about trademark, not copyright

Posted Jul 19, 2003 22:45 UTC (Sat) by pascal.martin (subscriber, #2995)
In reply to: Standards are about trademark, not copyright by giraffedata
Parent article: RFCs - insufficiently free?

Standard are contracts, not trademarks.

Similar to a law or a commercial contract, a standard is the result of an agreements between parties. Changing that text nullify the agreement.

BTW, if any text is free, there is no reason why I could not rewrite the Debian constitution myself and release it in the wild as the "latest version"? I am sure that would generate an interesting trail of emails :-)

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Posted Jul 21, 2003 16:59 UTC (Mon) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

That argument sounds a bit like SCO's claim that Linux users would be able
to erase "evidence" if they revealed what portions of the kernel they
believe were "stolen".

Being able to make a copy of something and change it does not mean that
the original is changed.

Especially if the copy is required to be called something different :)